Mon Repos 2022: Oxymoronic crocodile tears; boring yet laughable

Jul 02, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – This society is so psychologically corrugated that maybe it is beyond redemption. It is alleged that a social media post composed a fiction that the policeman who shot Quindon Bacchus was no longer in custody and this led to protest which led to an-Indian violence.
Since then we have had deluge of commentaries and denunciations including opinions from the Guyana Press Association (GPA) and the Stabroek News about the role of social media and its pretense to be doing journalistic tasks. Such crocodile years have an oxymoronic flair. They are boring yet they make you laugh.
The negative penetration of social media of Guyanese society is not the only problematic sore. What is cancerous is the dystopian, corrugated nature of Guyanese society thus the choice of words to title this column. The so-called culprit is said to be the Daily News. But there are social media outposts that are far more irresponsible than the Daily News and they are patronised because they are anti-government.
There are mainstream media houses whose recklessness mirror what goes on in these social media outfits. The GPA had the actor that goes under the name “Guyanese Critic” in mind when it chastised governmental leaders for appearing on his programme.
This columnist is saying with enormous conviction that what Guyanese Critic utters on his platform is far less dangerous, inciting, racist, disturbing than other social media outlets. Stabroek News reporter, Miranda La Rose and GPA’s official, Denis Chabrol, were on a social media programme that is billions of miles more unacceptable than Guyanese Critic.
Eminent personalities in Guyanese society including Stanley Ming, Ralph Ramkarran, Christopher Ram, Khemraj Ramjattan and others were guests on different occasions on a social media forum, an outlet that in my opinion is less acceptable than Guyanese Critic.
Listen to Black Pudding Maan and tell me if Guyanese Critic can be compared to him in terms of bile, vitriol, violent incitement, racial sermonising. What did the Daily News did that we don’t see in the mainstream media and among civil society actors? Almost daily we see the mainstream media carrying letters and interviews that condemn the March 2020 election as tampered with by the PPP and that the APNU+AFC won.
No decent newspaper in the UK and the US would publish a letter that expresses the view that Donald Trump won the American presidency and not Joe Biden. There are things a mainstream media house simply does not publish because such things are not socially fit to be published. Yet we can find constant race-baiting in letters in the newspapers.
For five months in 2020 during the election rigging, one newspaper carried columns that supported the fraud and derogated the international observers, one of which referred to those observers as aliens. A columnist in that newspaper wrote that she was a victim of racism in a furniture store.
What was the reason? The attendants ignored her. The said columnist wrote that Guyana has a natural inherent bias against Black people. This is what contributes to the expanding problem of racial animosity. What happened at Mon Repos was not sparked or caused by the Daily News. The crocodile tears are boring yet hilarious.
All of a sudden we are being told about the recklessness of the Daily News. I point readers to an online publication named Village Voice. I make no further observation than to say go and read it and tell me if you would make a comparison with it and the Daily News and Guyanese Critic.
I saw something strange on a Globe-Span zoom programme about six weeks ago that stunned me. One of the guests, opposition figure, Timothy Jonas with directness in his voice asked the head of Transparency Institute-Guyana, Frederick Collins, to state explicitly that there were attempts to rig the March 2020 election.
Two things flashed across my mind as I watched the exchange. One was that it was natural for Transparency Institute-Guyana, given its raison d’être, to denounce the rigging. Secondly, why Mr. Jonas would ask Mr. Collins to state his position in 2022? In the presence of Donald Rodney and Tacuma Ogunseye, an anti-government critic who functions in civil society told me that he only reads one newspaper. I carried that confession in a previous column.
There is a daily outpouring of sentiments all over this country by persons of status that lament how the racial divide is expanding, how the political poison is spreading. But those very people help the expansion and the spreading and pretend that they are democratic and independent. Mon Repos was not caused by the Daily News. It was always there and we know who helps to grow it.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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